East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Shanghai Under Fire

The snippet above is the opening of Shanghai Under Fire: July 1937 – March 1938, a 120-pages book published by the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury that provides a day-by-day breakdown of what came to be known as The Battle of Shanghai.

You can find relatively cheap reprints on Amazon, or a digitized copy in the Internet Archive, which is the one I am using right now.
The digital text lacks definition and makes sometimes for hard reading, and the photographs, that take up the bulk of the volume, are not so good in the digital edition, but really, if you are looking for images of the Battle of Shanghai, a simple Google search will land you dozens of fine specimens, many of them better scans of the pages of this book.

This book was a jolly good find – most of the action in The Ministry of Storms takes place in Shanghai in the second half of 1937, and a day-by-day account of the events is exactly what I needed to carefully map the coming and goings of Felice Sabatini and his companions.

The following sample entry gives you an idea of the level of detail the book provides.

I will not wax lyrically (once again) about the joys of doing research, or about the joys of the Internet Archive – but this really was a great find.